Simone Weil
Simone Adolphine Weil was a French philosopher, mystic and political activist. Despite her short life, her ideas concerning religion, spirituality and politics have remained widely influential in contemporary philosophy.
She was born in Paris to an Alsatian Jewish family. Her elder brother, André, would later become a renowned mathematician. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, taking several breaks because of poor health and in order to devote herself to political activism. She assisted in the trade union movement, taking the side of the anarchists known as the Durruti Column in the Spanish Civil War. During a twelve-month period she worked as a labourer, mostly in car factories, so that she could better understand the working class.
Weil became increasingly religious and inclined towards mysticism as her life progressed. She died of heart failure in 1943, while working for the Free French government in exile in Britain. Her uncompromising personal ethics may have contributed to her death—she had restricted her food intake in solidarity with the inhabitants of Nazi-occupied France.
Weil wrote throughout her life, although most of her writings did not attract much attention until after her death. In the 1950s and '60s, her work became famous in continental Europe and throughout the English-speaking world. Her philosophy and theological thought has continued to be the subject of extensive scholarship across a wide range of fields, covering politics, society, feminism, science, education and classics.
Early life
Weil was born in her parents' apartment in Paris on 3 February 1909, the daughter of Bernard Weil, a medical doctor from an agnostic Alsatian Jewish background, who moved to Paris after the German annexation of Alsace–Lorraine and Salomea "Selma" Reinherz, who was born into a Jewish family in Rostov-on-Don and raised in Belgium. According to Osmo Pekonen, "the family name Weil came to be when many Levis in the Napoleonic era changed their names this way, by anagram." Weil was a healthy baby for her first six months, but then suffered a severe attack of appendicitis; thereafter, she struggled with poor health throughout her life. Weil's parents were fairly affluent and raised their children in an attentive and supportive atmosphere. She was the younger of her parents' two children. Her brother was the mathematician André Weil, with whom she would always enjoy a close relationship.Weil was distressed by her father having to leave home for several years after being drafted to serve in the First World War. Eva Fogelman, Robert Coles and several other scholars believe that this experience may have contributed to the exceptionally strong altruism which Weil displayed throughout her life. For example, a young Weil sent her share of sugar and chocolate to soldiers fighting at the front. When Weil was 10 she joined striking workers chanting L'Internationale marching on the street below her apartment. When visiting a resort with her family and learning of the wages of the workers she encouraged the workers to unionize.
From her childhood home, Weil acquired an obsession with cleanliness; in her later life she would sometimes speak of her "disgustingness" and think that others would see her this way, even though in her youth she had been considered highly attractive. Weil was generally highly affectionate, but she almost always avoided any form of physical contact, even with female friends.
Weil's mother stated that her daughter much preferred boys to girls and that she always did her best to teach her daughter what she believed were masculine virtues. According to her friend and biographer, the philosopher Simone Pétrement, Weil decided early in life that she would need to adopt masculine qualities and sacrifice opportunities for love affairs in order to fully pursue her vocation to improve social conditions for the disadvantaged. From her late teenage years, Weil would generally disguise her "fragile beauty" by adopting a masculine appearance, hardly ever using makeup and often wearing men's clothes. Both Weil's parents referred to her as "our son number two", at the request of Weil and in letters to her parents while a student, she used the masculine form of French participles and signed her name the masculine "Simon".
Academic studies
Weil was a precocious student and was proficient in Ancient Greek by age 12, as she and her brother André had taught themselves Ancient Greek and used it to speak to each other when they did not want their parents to understand what they were saying. She later learned Sanskrit so that she could read the Bhagavad Gita in the original.As a teenager, Weil studied at the Lycée Henri IV under the tutelage of her admired teacher Émile Chartier, more commonly known as "Alain".
Weil attracted much attention at the Lycée Henri IV with her radical opinions and actions such as organising against the military draft. For these reasons she was called the "Red Virgin", and even "The Martian" by her mentor. Weil gained a reputation for her strict devotion to ethics, with classmates referring to her as the "categorical imperative in skirts". Officials at the school were outraged by her indifference to clothing, her refusal to participate in their traditions, and her ignoring a rule banning women from smoking with male students, for which she was suspended.
At ENS, Weil briefly met Simone de Beauvoir, and their meeting led to disagreement. Weil stated that, "one thing alone mattered in the world today: the revolution that would feed all people on earth", with a young Beauvoir replying that the point of life was to find meaning, not happiness. Weil cut her off, stating that, "it's easy to see you've never gone hungry".
Weil finished first in the exam for the certificate of "General Philosophy and Logic" with Simone de Beauvoir finishing second, ahead of the 28 other students, all male. In 1931, Weil earned her DES, with a thesis titled, "Science et perception dans Descartes" under the supervision of Léon Brunschvicg. She received her agrégation that same year.
Work and political activism
She often became involved in political action out of sympathy with the working class. In 1915, when she was only six years old, she refused sugar and chocolate in solidarity with the troops entrenched along the Western Front. In 1919, at 10 years of age, she declared herself a Bolshevik. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers' movement. She wrote political tracts, marched in demonstrations and advocated workers' rights. At this time, she was a Marxist, pacifist and trade unionist.Teaching in Le Puy
While teaching in Le Puy, she became involved in local political activity, supporting local striking workers underpaid by the City Council. Weil joined protest marches with them and even shared wine with them, facing criticism from local elites and an antisemitic attack in a local paper. When the school director called Weil in for questioning, students and coworkers rallied behind her and ultimately the city council raised the pay of the workers. Weil often held classes outdoors, often refused to share grades with school leadership, and is said to have created a "family atmosphere". She also traveled weekly to Saint-Étienne to teach workers French literature, believing literature could be a tool for revolution and give workers ownership over their heritage and revolution.Factory work and travels
Weil began to feel her work was too narrow and elite, telling her students it was an error to "reason in place of finding out" and that philosophy was a matter of action based in truth and that truth must be based in something. This led Weil to leave Le Puy to work in factories and perform the repetitive, machine-like work that underlay her definition of le malheur, saying that workers were reduced to a machine-like existence, where they could not consider rebellion.Weil never formally joined the French Communist Party, and in her twenties she became increasingly critical of Marxism. According to Pétrement, she was one of the first to identify a new form of oppression not anticipated by Marx, where élite bureaucrats could make life just as miserable for ordinary people as did the most exploitative capitalists. Weil critiqued Marxist theorists, stating "they themselves have never been cogs in the machinery of factory". Weil also doubted aspects of revolution, stating revolution is a word for "which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the laboring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content". Weil felt oppression was not limited to any particular division of labor, but flows from la puissance or power, which affects all people.
In 1932, Weil visited Germany to help Marxist activists, who were at the time considered to be the strongest and best organised communists in Western Europe, but Weil considered them no match for the up-and-coming fascists. When she returned to France, her political friends there dismissed her fears, thinking Germany would continue to be controlled by the centrists or by those to the left. After Hitler rose to power in the beginning of 1933, Weil spent much of her time trying to help German communists fleeing his regime. Weil would sometimes publish articles about social and economic issues, including "Oppression and Liberty," as well as numerous short articles for trade union journals. This work criticised popular Marxist thought and gave a pessimistic account of the limits of both capitalism and socialism. The work however uses a Marxist method of analysis: paying attention to oppression, critiquing Weil's own position as an intellectual, and advances both manual labor and theory and practice. Leon Trotsky personally responded to several of her articles, attacking both her ideas and her as a person. However, according to Pétrement, he was influenced by some of Weil's thought.
In 1933, Weil was dismissed from a teaching job in Auxerre and transferred to Roanne. Weil participated in the French general strike of 1933, called to protest against unemployment and wage cuts. The following year, she took a 12-month leave of absence from her teaching position to work incognito as a labourer in two factories, one owned by Alstom and one by Renault, believing that this experience would allow her to connect with the working class.
In 1935, she began teaching in Bourges and started Entre Nous, a journal that was produced and written by factory workers. Weil donated most of her income to political causes and charitable endeavours.